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Kamis, 26 November 2009

More flexible configuration merging with Data::PrefixMerge

(I'm planning a refactoring for Data::PrefixMerge and will be renaming it to Data::ModeMerge. Thought I'd post something on the blog.)

In a typical Unix program, there are three levels of configuration: system-wide config file (/etc/myapp.conf), per-user config file (~/.myapprc), and command-line options. It's convenient programatically to load each of those in a hash and then merge (e.g. using Data::Merger or Hash::Merge) system-wide hash with the per-user hash, and then merge again the result with the command-line hash to get the a single hash as the final configuration. Your program can from there on deal with this just one hash instead of three.

In a typical merging process between two hashes (left-side and right-side), when there is a conflicting key, then the right-side key will override the left-side. This is usually the desired behaviour in our said program as the system-wide config is there to provide defaults, and the per-user config (and the command-line arguments) allow a user to override those defaults.

But suppose that the user wants to unset a certain configuration setting that is defined by the system-wide config? She can't do that unless she edits the system-wide config (in which she might need admin rights), or the program allows the user to disregard the system-wide config. The latter is usually what's implemented by many Unix programs, e.g. the -noconfig command-line option in mplayer. But this has two drawbacks:

a slightly added complexity in the program. The program needs to provide a special, extra comand-line option.

the user loses all the default settings in the system-wide config. What she needed in the first place was to just unset a single setting (a single key-value pair of the hash).

The ! prefix tells Data::ModeMerge to do a DELETE mode merging. So the final result will lack the foo key.

On the other hand, what if the system admin wants to protect a certain configuration setting from being overriden by the user or the command-line? This is useful in a hosting or other retrictive environment where we want to limit users' freedom to some degree. This is possible via the KEEP mode (prefix ^):

prefix_merge({"^bar"=>2, "^baz"=>1}, {bar=>3, "!baz"=>0, quux=>7});

will result in:

{bar=>2, baz=>1, quux=>7}

effectively protecting bar and baz from being overriden/deleted/etc.

Aside from the two mentioned modes, there are also a few others available by default: ADD (prefix +), CONCAT (prefix .), SUBTRACT (prefix -), as well as the plain ol' NORMAL/override (optional prefix *).

You can add other modes by writing a mode handler module. (planned in upcoming Data::ModeMerge release)

You can change the default prefixes for each mode if you want. You can disable each mode individually. (planned in upcoming Data::ModeMerge release)

You can default to always using a certain mode, like the NORMAL mode, and ignore all the prefixes, in which case Data::ModeMerge will behave like most other merge modules.

You can change default mode, prefixes, disabling/enabling mode, etc on a per-hash basis using the so-called options key.

2 komentar:

As written on the post, command line options are converted into a hash and then merged too, so it's the same case. See my Config::Tree module for an application of this (multiple sources of configuration + PrefixMerge-style merging). Its documentation needs more work though.